TONI BLANK: A CASE STUDY OF THE LANGUAGE OF A SCHIZOPHRENE

Abstract

Schizophrenia is one of the chronic mental disorders. Patients of schizophrenia cannot
communicate with others properly. Also, they cannot produce good utterances syntactically and
semantically. This is caused by their language dysfunction. In this research, I am interested in
analyzing language dysfunction in schizophrenia. I choose Toni Blank‟s utterances in “Toni
Blank Show Session One” as the object of my research. I focus on how schizophrenic‟s language
dysfunctions are classified and how these dysfunctions are being analyzed using linguistic
framework. To analyze the data, I used Thought, Language, and Communication (TLC) scale
and cohesion coherence frameworks. The purpose of this study is to give linguistic analysis
about phenomena of language dysfunctions uttered by Toni Blank in “Toni Blank Show Session
One”. The data used in this research are utterances which contain language dysfunctions from
three episodes in “Toni Blank Show Session One”, entitled “Valentine Day”, “Teroris”, and
“Sehat Ala Mas Toni”. I used purposive sampling to collect the data. In analyzing the data, I used
Padan and Agih methods by Sudaryanto (1993). To interpret the data, I used cohesion and
coherence framework. In 26 utterances which contain schizophrenic‟s language dysfunctions in
“Toni Blank Show Session One”, I find that the language dysfunctions which are uttered by Toni
are poverty of content, tangentiality, loss of goal, circumstantiality, illogicality, incoherence
(word salad), neologism, clanging, echolalia, and self-reference. Poverty of speech, pressure of
speech, distractibility, derailment, stilted speech, perseveration, and blocking are not found in the
data.